Sankt Florian, born in Aelium Cetium (modern Sankt Pölten) was a Roman commander and colonial administrator in the Roman province of Noricum, with a special responsibility for organising and leading fire-fighting brigades. He fell victim to the Diocletianic persecutions, initially by not enforcing proscriptions against Christians. Refusing to offer sacrifice to Roman Gods, he was ordered to be burnt at the stake, but when installed on his pyre he challenged the Roman soldiers he had commanded to set fire to it, and they refused. They did however martyr him by casting him into the River Enns with a millstone around his neck. He is widely venerated in Austria and Southern Germany as well as in Catholic lands further east, and his association with quenching and defying fire led to him being sought as an intercessor against fire, which is why he carries a wooden bucket of water (here beautifully observed with its wooden base sealed with pitch against leaks), which is his attribute. He is much depicted in painting and statuary in central Europe, but less often in Italy.

This painting is the presumed left-hand panel of an altarpiece, by an unidentified Bavarian workshop. Another altarpiece panel, clearly by the same hand with similar characteristic down-turned mouths, and perhaps from the same retable, depicts Saints Acacius and Pantaleon, and is exhibited in the Staatsgalerie Burghausen, where this work was displayed until earlier this year (inv. 9457).

NOTE ON PROVENANCE

Baron Pichot l'Amabilais, born in Dunkirk in 1820, assembled a large collection of paintings, drawings, sculpture, ivories, bronzes, silver, enamels, glass, furniture, illuminated manuscripts and porcelain after he settled in Dijon in 1851. In paintings and sculpture his taste ran to the middle-ages and the 14th and 15th centuries, particularly the German, Austrian and French Schools, although he also collected Italian and Spanish gold-ground paintings and sculpture, and a few later works, including a Tiepolo. His collection passed to his daughter Marie-Henriette, who married a Dijonais doctor, Paul Dard. After her death on 27 February 1916 the collection, numbering well over a thousand items, was bequeathed to the City of Dijon, with the stipulation that it should be displayed together in one important gallery entitled Salle du Docteur et de Mme Paul Dard (which is why it does not bear the name of her father, whose collection it was), and was opened to the public in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon in 1921.¹ Among its greatest treasures are two panels by Konrad Witz, and the Primitives and porcelain form the core of the collection as displayed today.

It is far from certain however if this Sankt Florian formed part of the Pichot L'Amabilais-Dard collection, although it is certainly consistent with its taste. Equally unclear is how it might have left the collection, but of the 2,088 items in the inventory taken at the death of Mme Dard in 1916, only 1,377 entered the Musée des Beaux-Arts, and it is assumed that the remainder were dispersed, by means unknown.²

Kunsthandlung A.S. Drey

The art dealing firm of A.S. Drey was established in the 19th century, and had offices in New York and London, but its headquarters were in a palatial building in Maximiliansplatz in Munich built to the plans of Gabriel von Seidl in 1911 (now the Chamber of Commerce). The proprietors, Siegfried Dray, Ludwig Stern, Friedrich Stern, Franz Drey and Paul Drey, were all subjected to persecution due to their Jewish heritage: in 1935 the circular issued by the Reichskammer der bildenden Künste announced their exclusion and ordered the dissolution of the firm, which resulted in the enforced sale of the following year.

¹ For more information see S. Jugie, in L'art des collections. Bicentainaire du musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon, E. Starcky and S. Jugie (eds), exh. cat., Dijon 2000, pp. 278-85.
² Jugie 2000, p. 280.